Eutelsat: Major challenges as Berneke signs off
May 6, 2025
Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke is stepping down from the company. The market responded by seeing Eutelsat’s share price rise by 12.5 per cent on May 5th to €4.50 and at one point to €4.67. But incoming CEO Jean-François Fallacher has to face some heavyweight challenges when he officially joins on June 1st.
Fallacher’s background is with France Telecom-owned Orange and Orange has the French State as a major shareholder. Both France Telecom and the French government are seen as being enthusiastic about much closer involvement in Eutelsat.
French newspaper Le Monde in April said: “For nearly three months, the French government has been scrambling to save Eutelsat”.
Eutelsat is facing a severe cash crunch, not helped by disappointing revenues from its OneWeb division which Berneke completed in September 2023 (it was initially announced in July 2022). Berneke was appointed in January 2022.
One authoritative report noted: “I don’t think Fallacher would have joined at this stage unless he was confident of a pending successful corporate action to address the funding needs.”
That cash security is urgent. Eutelsat is seeking a multi-billion loan guarantee from France’s export credit agency in order to fund replacement OneWeb satellites and its forward participation in the IRIS2 mega-constellation scheme.
Meanwhile, Berneke wrote to staff and “partners across the world” on May 5th, saying “Since I took over the CEO position in January 2022, the world has changed in many ways; Russia invaded Ukraine and put geopolitics on the radar for leaders and companies all over the world and the early morning attack on the Viasat satellite – on the day of the Russian invasion – placed SatComs, space and subsequently Eutelsat in the centre of it all.”
“The world has changed immensely and so has Eutelsat. We announced the merger with OneWeb in the summer of ’22 and completed the merger the following year, creating the first LEO-GEO player in the SatCom industry and the only operational LEO constellation operator besides Starlink in the US. New steps were taken in 2024 when Eutelsat joined forces with 2 other operators and won the significant 10,6Bn Euro IRIS2 contract with the EU with the objective of developing a European Souverain space connectivity capacity and ensuring that Europe remain sovereign and independent – also in Space. In parallel with all of this; Eutelsat’s GEO Tech teams managed no less than 5 GEO launches. And last but not least, we partially divested our passive ground infrastructure and welcomed EQT as new investor, and jointly we are now on track to create the world’s first satellite antenna company,” she continued.
“So, looking to the future; Eutelsat is set for a full alignment with a world where Europe is a strong souverain space player and strongly aligned with the telecom connectivity ecosystem. So, with Eutelsat’s strategy anchored in the IRIS2 and European souverain future, we look to adjust our governance and shareholder structure, and this has paved the way for our CEO succession, which will unfold during the next month. Jean-Francois Fallacher will join as Eutelsat’s new CEO on June 1, and I will make sure he gets onboarded with our fantastic teams, our cherished customers, strategic suppliers and regulatory partners,” she concluded.